12/15/2023 0 Comments Hua yu mandarin scholarship![]() ![]() Moving on – 文藻外語學院įor various reasons, my choice fell on 文藻外語學院 in 高雄, Taiwan’s second-largest city located in the south. I needed a bigger language centre with more options and other people who took learning as seriously as I did. I was far behind when I started, but felt that things had already become too easy when Christmas neared.Īnother problem was that our classes were held in the evening, which meant it was very difficult to find native speakers to socialise with I had time during the day when everybody worked or went to class, I was busy when they had time off. I was the only full-time language student in my class, and spent perhaps five times as many hours as they did per week learning Chinese. My classmates had studied for about as long as I had, but mostly in Taiwan, which makes a huge difference.Įven though I think spending a few months at 中華大學 wasn’t so bad, it became apparent towards the end of the first semester that it wouldn’t work in the long run. I understood perhaps 50% of what was said in class. To summarise, I could say a few things, but found it impossible to understand what people said. The biggest chock was language, which I touched upon in the previous article. All things practical went very smoothly, and I received great help from the university. This seemed important, so I went there.Īrriving in Taiwan was overwhelming, but mostly in a positive way. Out of the few that did, 中華大學 was the only one that seemed to care about each individual student. I sent e-mails to all institutions on the official list. You see, when I applied for the scholarship, I had missed the fact that I was also supposed to have applied to a university, which I hadn’t. The truth is that I went there because they were one of the few institutions who really cared about me. All Taiwanese who hear that ask the same question: Why? It’s a young university with a technical profile and completely unknown for their language centre. I spent the first semester at 中華大學 outside 新竹. You don’t turn down the offer of studying a language for one year with most costs covered. When I actually received the scholarship, I sort of had to go. My teacher in Sweden forwarded a note about a scholarship ( the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship) and I applied for it without really expecting either to get it or to continue studying Chinese. The decision to continue to study Chinese in Taiwan was mostly a coincidence. As a result of this, I started experimenting more on my own and learnt a lot about how to compensate for the weaknesses in courses and curricula. This brought me into contact with a whole new range of issues with language teaching as done in the Chinese-speaking world. This meant learning in an immersion environment combined with fairly traditional language lessons. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode:Īvailable on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms! Going to Taiwan This post is part of a series here are the other parts: After the first year, I moved to Taiwan to continue learning. In previous parts, I have already talked about why I started learning and what it was like to study Mandarin in Sweden. ![]() In this article, I will continue the story of how I learnt Chinese. ![]()
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